Entity tags (ETags) are a mechanism that servers and clients use to determine whether the entity in the client's cache matches the entity stored on the server from where the client received the entity. For example, a web server and a web browser executing on a client can use ETags to determine if an entity, such as a file stored in the web browser's cache matches the entity stored on the web server. An ETag is a string that uniquely identifies a specific version of a component. ETags are constructed in such a way that they include attributes that make them unique to a specific server hosting an entity. If the server is part of a cluster of servers that utilize load balancing, one server may provide the entity to the client, such that the client stores the entity with an ETag that includes attributes unique to the server that provided the entity. When the client attempts to validate the entity in a load balancing implementation, the client's request can be routed to a second server of the cluster of servers. In such situations, the second server will be unable to validate the entity since the ETag associated with the request will not match the ETag of the second server. As a result, the second server ends up sending the entity to the client again even though the contents of the entity stored in the second server may be identical to the contents of the entity stored in the client's cache.